Homegrown rumors

Despite more than 20 years of eradication efforts, two strains of polio have spread out from northern Nigeria and northern India — both places where many Muslims have resisted vaccines because of rumors that vaccine efforts are a Western plot to sterilize them.

Sadly, this nonsense is not confined to wild-eyed, third-world imams. A Springfield, Illinois radiologist, Dr. David Ayoub, has been telling audiences for years that the World Health Organization uses vaccines to sterilize poor women in third world countries. In this video Ayoub attacks the Global Alliance for Vaccination Initiatives (GAVI), and asks “Are powerful forces really trying to help the poor people or could it be for another agenda; the sterilization of the poor?”

Among GAVI’s founding partners is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the vaccines, and saved millions of young lives.

Astonishingly, Ayoub has a following in America’s homegrown anti-vaccine movement, and is a regular at anti-vaccine conferences, such as the AutismOne conference in Chicago last May. A Columbia, Missouri television news program has featured him as a vaccine expert without mentioning his penchant for improbable conspiracy theories.